Archive for September 17th, 2008

Today, GoGrid and RightScale announced a major new strategic product partnership. The full press release is below:

RightScale First to Deliver Integrated Management for Multi-Cloud Environments

Cloud Computing Momentum Builds with RightScale Support for FlexiScale, GoGrid and Rackspace

Interop New York Conference Expo (PRWEB) September 17, 2008 — RightScale, Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, today announced a major new strategic product and partnership initiative as it broadens its cloud management platform to support emerging clouds from new vendors, including FlexiScale and GoGrid, while continuing its long-standing support for Amazon’s EC2. RightScale is also working with Rackspace to assure compatibility with their cloud offerings, including Mosso and CloudFS. RightScale will be the first in the industry to offer an integrated management dashboard, where applications can be deployed once and managed across these and other clouds.

Businesses can take advantage of the nearly infinite scalability of cloud computing by using RightScale to deploy their applications on a supported cloud provider. They gain the capabilities of built-in redundancy, fault tolerance, and geographical distribution of resources – key enterprise demands for cloud providers. With RightScale, customers can leverage the leading cloud management platform to automatically deploy and manage their web applications – scaling up when traffic demands, and scaling back as appropriate – allowing them to focus on their core business objectives. RightScale’s automated system management, pre-packaged and re-usable components, leading service expertise and best practices have been proven as best-of-breed, with customers deploying hundreds of thousands of instances on Amazon’s EC2.

“Cloud computing is a disruptive force in the business world because it provides pay-as-you-go, on-demand, virtually infinite compute and storage resources that can expand or contract as needed,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, Inc. “A number of public providers are already adopting cloud architectures – and we also see private enterprise clouds coming on the horizon. Today’s announcement of RightScale’s partnerships with FlexiScale and GoGrid is an exciting indication of how mid-market and enterprise organizations can really take advantage of multi-cloud architectures. There will be huge opportunities for application design and deployment — we are at the beginning of a tidal shift in IT infrastructure.”

FlexiScale is the only UK-based cloud computing provider and offers a unique infrastructure on demand with 99.99% SLA and many special features. For example, each customer gets their own virtual disk so that data is segregated and they can do their own low level encryption, while virtual network traffic is also segregated to deliver added security. FlexiScale uniquely offers permanent on demand storage and was the first cloud provider to support Windows. With a strong reputation for customer service, it also enables the creation of custom packages such as golden images.

Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre and creator of FlexiScale commented: “Without this new ability to move swiftly and easily between platforms, customers could feel locked in and much more hesitant to try and use cloud computing. RightScale’s partnership initiative is a great example of how having near interoperability between systems will enable customers to be less hesitant of moving to a new technology, which is great for everyone. It means the industry can and will grow quicker than if it was only a handful of individual companies providing distinct services that weren’t compatible with each other.”

John Willis just produced an Interesting podcast with Michael Crandell (CEO of RightScale). In this podcast, John interviews Michael about RightScale’s recent announcement of the GoGrid/RightScale partnership as well as other partnerships and ideas.

If I could sum up the podcast, it would be how RightScale (with a partnership with GoGrid and others) are delivering the “on-ramp” to allow companies to migrate to the Cloud and provide portability to the cloud by providing a multi-hosted cloud infrastructure.